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+Runes
+=====
+
+As a programmer, I spend the vast majority of my time on a computer in a
+terminal window. This has always meant dealing with a wide variety of
+limitations related to the fact that a "terminal emulator" really is exactly
+that - at its core, it's emulating a decades-old hardware terminal interface.
+There's no reason why at this point we need to be tied to those old APIs, but
+all of the attempts I've seen so far to move away from that have involved
+rewriting the whole thing from the ground up, breaking compatibility with all
+of the existing terminal applications out there.
+
+This is why I decided to write Runes. Runes is a new terminal emulator with a
+goal not to fully emulate some ancient piece of hardware, but to support
+enough existing terminal control codes to run modern terminal software, and
+also to become a place to experiment with new features for terminal
+applications. There's no reason why terminals can't use actual graphics, or
+support mouse-based interfaces (better than xterm, which only supports
+clicks), or many other things like that which currently require switching to
+an entirely different application to run.
+
+Some amount of portability is also a goal. Rather than being Linux-specific,
+I'd like to be able to support at least recent versions of Linux, OSX,
+FreeBSD, and (maybe) Windows. Currently, only Linux is supported.
+
+Right now it is in a very early stage (I'm still in the process of
+implementing enough existing terminal functionality to be useful), but it
+works well enough for basic interactions (nethack is playable, for instance).
+Once enough functionality has been implemented to make it usable, I'll start
+looking into new extensions.
+
+Building
+--------
+Runes requires cairo, xlib, and libuv. Once those dependencies are installed,
+you should be able to build it just by running `make`. If you're interested in
+modifying the parser, you'll also need to install flex.
+
+Contributing
+------------
+You can report bugs and submit pull requests to https://github.com/doy/runes/.
+You can also contact me with questions, ideas, or patches at @doyster on
+twitter, or doy@tozt.net via email.